Boy Story: The Road Taken - 3. Meet the Penguin

Meet The Penguin

I hadn’t planned it that way, but the store where I worked provided me with a pretty active dating scene. A teenager has needs and therefore he dates. By the end of my college freshman year, I had two short-term relationships through the store. My first girlfriend, Sue, was pretty and had a decent body, but she was not much of a talker. She had no opinions, no hobbies, and not much to contribute, except she was pretty. She was about an 8 (on a 1 to 10 scale), but that only goes so far. I got tired of being the sole entertainment when we were together, so I just stopped calling her. She eventually dated another guy from the store, and I was off the hook.

The second girl I dated, Linda, had more to offer, wasn’t quite as good looking, but had huge breasts to make up for it. Not that she was a butterface by any means, but maybe a 7 rather than an 8. I lost my virginity with her, and she with me. As a responsible young man, I wore a condom. She was two years younger than me and went away to college after graduating high school. We wrote back and forth for a while, and then we eventually lost touch. It turned out to be a fortuitous thing in retrospect because I later heard she developed a drug problem, but I digress.

And then there was Sharon, the one girl I really had the hots for, who was constantly having problems with her long-term boyfriend. I was obviously the answer to her predicament. Of course, she didn’t see it that way. And rounding out the group were the girls who rated 6 or lower. They were OK to flirt with, but you didn’t want to be drunk around them in case one started to look good when you were worked up and buzzed. If anything of a sexual nature happened with one of them, you’d have a lovesick chick following you around thinking she was your girlfriend. And then you’d have to devise an exit strategy. I’d seen it happen to other guys at the store, so I knew it was a situation best avoided.

We had a small group of partiers at the store and we could occasionally find someone of age who would buy alcohol for us. When that happened, Friday night after work became party time. We would usually end up at someone’s house or if it was nice out, we had an outdoor party spot in the woods. I obviously couldn’t host such a party in my dorm room, so I went out of my way to treat other people’s houses with utmost respect and encouraged others to do so when we were invited somewhere.

Aside from the people who worked in my store, there was one girl of note named Barbara who worked in the mall record store. Her hobby was cute boys. Barbara was short and a little chubby, thus she earned the nickname “penguin” from her friends. On a scale of 1 to 10, she was about a 4 or 5. Barbara always liked boys who were way out of her league, and in the mall she knew where each one worked. When she was on her work breaks, she would make her rounds in the mall, visiting and chatting up the cream of the mall. To her credit, she was a great conversationalist, so no one would tell her off, plus she was basically harmless. And perhaps once in a while maybe she got lucky.

I met Barbara, or rather she met me, when I was a new employee. One night I was working with Jeff, who just happened to be one of the guys on her “visitation rounds.” Subsequently, I got on her radar by association and began getting frequent visits of my own. I was into new music and she worked in a record store, so we always had something to talk about. Fortunately at that time, I was dating one of the girls at the store, so Barbara never asked me out. That was her move—make friends with a cute guy, then ask him out. But if the guy was taken, she stayed friends because couples were always breaking up and she might have a chance at a later date. It took me a few months, but by being observant and talking to others, I had Barbara pretty well figured out.

Record store customers were not immune either. Cute guys entered the store at their own peril. I would bear witness to good-looking boys leaving there with their purchase priced at the employee discount and Barbara as their new best friend, while average-looking boys would be left alone to shop in peace.

I don’t think many guys took her up on her dating offers because I never knew her to have a boyfriend. But it wasn’t through lack of trying. And if she could get a cute guy to stop and talk with her for a few minutes, well, it was a small victory.

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